Love and Logic

Poison Alert!

Mom and Dad watched as their one-year-old son crawled around the floor of Marv Mozzarella's House of Fun. They noticed that little Carlton had found some tasty lead paint chips on the floor. Ma and Pa really wanted to do something. The chips were bad for their boy, but the other parents were letting their kids eat them. Could something so widespread and readily available really be that bad?

While most parents aren't sitting around letting their kids eat lead paint, too many of them let poison ooze into their homes via their television sets. This toxic waste, represented by explicit violence and sexual images, is being beamed into millions of homes via satellite and cable.

Just like poison, these images may not cause immediate death, however, the toxic effects do accumulate and cause certain harm to body, mind, and spirit. Study after study has shown the horrific effects of exposure to sex and violence: Kids become desensitized, lose their ability to experience empathy, and fail to develop healthy cause-effect thinking.

At Love and Logic, we believe that children learn to make good decisions about big and important matters by making plenty of poor decisions about small matters, and experiencing empathy and logical consequences from the adults in their lives. As a result, we believe that wise parents allow their children to make plenty of affordable mistakes.

Watching sex and violence on television is not an "affordable mistake."

Watching explicit trash on MTV is akin to dumpster diving.

As adults, we can remember that we have control over whether we make it easy for children to ingest poison within our homes. Smart folks don't leave pesticides within reach of their toddlers. Smart folks also call their cable or satellite providers and cancel the programming that brings sex and violence into their homes. Others decide to password protect the explicit channels.

Best of all, the wisest parents engage in plenty of loving conversations with their youngsters about the fact that the human mind resembles a computer: Garbage in, garbage out.

Thanks for reading! Our goal is to help as many families as possible. If this is a benefit, forward it to a friend.